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Converting a draft into a new story.

I'm going to try and start writing shorter posts, to make it less of a chore for you to read. So here goes.

I'm in the first steps of tearing apart The Sometimes Sword, mostly just thinking about it. I have yet to do any actual changes to the words, but I'm making progress nonetheless. Yesterday while I was walking into the Tech building for my math class, I had an epiphany of sorts. It wasn't a specific idea for the story, more like an over-all revelation. It occurred to me that I wasn't thinking big enough, despite my intentions to reorganize the book. I needed to completely re-imagine the whole thing, from the ground up.

So I spent some time thinking about everything (you might begin to detect a common theme here about thinking...): what I like to read, what I want to write, whether or not I had pigeon-holed myself, etc. I came to several conclusions, one of which was a pretty big deal. I've always been a fan of urban fantasy, and wanted some of that feeling in my book, but at the same time, I don't want The Sometimes Sword to take place in our world. So as of right now, I am in the process of converting an existing character into a modern-day visitor to the world of TSS, sort of a Narnia/Harry Potter type infiltration of a magical world...deal. This changes so much existing material that I will essentially be rewriting the book as opposed to revising it, regardless of the scale. It's a monumental change, but since I'm writing it as a new book I will hopefully make more headway than if I had continued editing.

Perhaps this will give me the motivation I need to get some real progress made toward my dream of being a writer, and as winter break approaches, perhaps I'll have the time too.

3 comments:

This kind of goes along with what you were talking about in an earlier post. If you think of your first draft as more of a trial run, this type of overhaul isn't really that big of a deal. You've made so much progress as a writer since you wrote your first draft, and you've learned so much from it, you may as well rewrite it anyways. It was a good way to get a shoddy version of what will become your final version :) Now that you're better at writing, another draft will be much faster anyways, I think.

I agree with Becky, this goes hand in hand with what you've been talking about and to be perfectly honest, something you said really stuck out to me in a previous post. I never really looked at my first draft to be anything other than something I would set aside and edit later with "new eyes", but what you said about the first draft being more a way to organize the ideas floating around by basically spewing them onto the paper was something that has been bouncing around inside my skull since I read it and has actually helped me get back into some sort of writing grove. I happy to see that you yourself have managed to start shaking off that writer's depression and get back to it as well.

It's good to hear that something I wrote on here has done some amount of good. Sometimes I wonder. That writing groove is really important; falling out of it to begin with was my main problem. Hopefully we can all keep pushing until we get back into it.